Act of God (9 page)

Kat was necking with a boy behind the school gym one day when she glanced over and saw Edith watching from the bleachers, her features so judgmental that it felt, to Kat, as if Edith’s face had accused hers of being a liar. Once Kat stopped being Edith’s protector, the mean girls sensed her vulnerability. They bullied Edith on the way home from school one afternoon while Kat looked the other way. That evening, as their mother applied iodine to Edith’s cut lip, Kat asked Edith’s forgiveness in their secret twin language, but Edith pretended not to hear. It was days before she spoke to Kat, weeks before she trusted her—if she ever did again.

The sun finally came out after nine solid days of rain. In bright spokes of morning light, Kat returned to her old block, suitcase in hand. She’d left Edith’s bag with the Indian clerk, pleading with him to keep it safe behind his desk until she knew where she was going. If Frank couldn’t take her in, she’d ask Gladys. Gladys and Edith were close. She called Edie her adopted daughter. Didn’t that make Kat a daughter, too?

She found Gladys sitting in her white van parked at the end of the block. Only after she rapped on the driver’s window did she realize that Gladys had been asleep. Blinking
bewilderedly, the old lady stared at the steering wheel, at her disheveled visage in the rearview mirror, at Kat’s face in the window.

Kat gestured for her to roll down the glass, and Gladys cracked it an inch. “I can’t open it any more or the cats will jump out. Blackie got loose this morning.”

“What are you doing sleeping in your van?”

“We got evacuated yesterday. I found mushrooms growing in the cat litter. My niece invited me to spend the night but she’s allergic to my cats. Where are we going to live?”

“Go to your niece’s, get some proper rest. Leave the cats in the van. I’ll feed them, or Frank will. It’s only for a few days.”

“It’s forever. The HAZMAT chief called it a supermold. The city is burning down my house tomorrow. Where’s Edith?”

“You don’t know? She’s gone. Edith is dead.”

“Oh my god, oh my god.” Gladys lifted the gold cross around her neck and kissed it. “Your sister is in heaven.”

It was the first time that Kat hadn’t been reduced to sobs when someone consoled her about Edith, and suddenly the need to tell every excruciating detail about that night came on her like a thirst. “She was fine when I left in the morning. We both had soft-boiled eggs from room service. We were staying at the Metropolitan. Edith died the day before the big storm … no, no, it was the first day of the storm. I remember thinking, when I woke up that morning, that the approaching thunderheads looked biblical. Her death must have been very sudden, she was in her bra and underwear. She looked so peaceful, I thought she was sleeping.”

“Why does He always take the good ones first?” Gladys dropped the gold cross as if it had bit her and looked at
Kat with scarlet-rimmed, flooded eyes. “I thought Pippa was sleeping, too, but I don’t believe for a minute her death was peaceful.”

“Who’s Pippa?”

“My Siamese. I found her three nights ago curled on her pillow. Pippa never shared her pillow with the other cats, but that morning, Billy lay beside her. Mushroom poisoning is a torturous way to die, don’t kid yourself. And now, Missy looks sick.”

“You think the cats ate the mushrooms?”

“Not Pippa. She was such a finicky queen. She would never have eaten a mushroom. She and Edith must have breathed in the same deadly spores.”

Kat remembered Edith’s glowing bed with the iridescent slime seeping out from under the bed skirt. How could she not have breathed in the spores? Her mattress was practically alive. They should have been evacuated weeks ago. They should have just up and left when Edith smelled that foul odor. “Do you know how many times Edith tried to warn Vida that this could happen?” She started to tell Gladys about the glowing mattress but stopped herself. Gladys had just lost her favorite cat. She didn’t need to hear about a glowing mattress.

In the van’s rear, fifteen agitated felines paced the tight space, avoiding a sickly creature with crusted yellow eyes. “The vet said Pippa died from old age, but now my two-year-old Missy has the same symptoms. Who’s going to take in an old lady with seventeen cats? Sixteen,” she corrected herself. “Will you look around for Blackie today? He might have tried to go home.”

“I’ll put out the word,” said Kat.

She ran into Frank at the corner coffee shop. He didn’t see her at first. He sat in a booth, relishing a jelly doughnut
with his eyes closed. “You feeling okay?” he asked, when she sat down across from him. “You look like you haven’t been sleeping too good.”

“Edie is dead.”

Frank must have endured stunning punches during his prizefighting years, because the two sides of his face no longer aligned. But that morning, when she told him the news, the shock momentarily set every feature straight, and Kat remembered what a handsome young man he had been.

He already had a big bite of doughnut in his mouth. He swallowed it as if it were a wad of hot chili. His eyes watered, and he used his napkin, dusty from sugar, to blow his nose. “Oh, Kat, I’m so sorry.” He moved to her side of the booth and held her.

“Frank, I miss her so much.”

“Course you do. You guys were twins. Edie was a grand lady. You know, she’s the one who made Vida hire me. She was real worried about that smell in the basement. Vida should of listened to her.”

“Gladys thinks the mushrooms killed her.”

“I guess she told you about Pippa.”

“Frank, can I stay at your place for a few days? I had to check out of the hotel.”

“I guess you didn’t hear. A whole bunch of us got evacuated yesterday. I’m sleeping on my cousin’s sofa. I’ll ask him, but his wife don’t like me in the house as it is. She’s worried I’m contaminated. She made me shower with DDT soap and she burned all my clothes.”

“Your house, too? I’m sorry, Frank. Maybe Mrs. Syzmanski can take me in?”

“She can’t. Mr. Syzmanski found a mushroom coming out of their kitchen drain this morning. Their building is being evacuated now.”

Frank bought her a coffee and a doughnut to go, and carried her suitcase for her. The HAZMAT truck was double-parked in front of the Syzmanskis’ six-story, walk-up tenement. The elderly couple and their tenants, in various increments of shock, staggered out, as if on anesthetized feet—a young bleach-blond Asian man in a germ mask carrying a passel of electronics, a middle-aged couple struggling with a stroller and a newborn, a heavily tattooed young woman carrying a screaming caged cockatoo. When she saw Kat, her expression hardened from distress to agitation to menace.

“You! You and your sister were the first to get the mushrooms! Their nest must be somewhere in your basement!”

“My sister is dead!”

Kat could have heard a pin drop if not for the police radios and the screaming cockatoo.

In the open windows of the uninfected buildings, worried neighbors watched and listened. Marty, the barrelchested plumber who lived with his ninety-year-old mother in the house next to Gladys’s, stood sentry duty on his stoop, as if the mushrooms couldn’t enter without a password. He suddenly began hurling obscenities at the HAZMAT chief. “For fuck’s sake, cut off the shithole water main and the piss-ass gas lines, and then burn down the goddamn infested houses before we all die.”

“Listen to him,” said his mother, standing beside her scarlet-faced son, “he’s a licensed plumber.”

The policewoman who had evacuated Edith and Kat only seven days before now herded the new refugees away from the condemned building.

“No one is really going to burn down our house, are they?” asked the middle-aged father, empty stroller in tow.

“Our baby might be poisoned?” asked the mother, clutching the newborn.

“We have rights,” said the tattooed girl, carrying the flapping, shrieking white whirligig of caged feathers.

Kat approached the HAZMAT chief. All fell silent. After all, she was the elder of this tribe. She was their future.

“Did the mushrooms kill my sister?” she asked.

The chief took off his mask. “I’m sorry for your loss, but I don’t know what happened to your sister.” He turned back to his men, a dozen yellow-clad figures in hoods and masks. They were tramping across the roofs, lowering a gigantic yellow tent over the infested buildings.

“What are they doing?” asked the middle-aged father.

“It’s a gas chamber,” said Mrs. Syzmanski.

“What about all our stuff?”

“You want that stuff?” his wife asked.

“Yes, it’s everything we own.”

“It’s infected. Her sister is dead. Our baby might be poisoned.”

“Our mother’s archives are inside,” Kat told Frank.

“So are my old boxing gloves.”

“You’d think Vida would be here.”

“She’s probably rehearsing,” he said. “She’s starring in some free Shakespeare play at Central Park tonight.”

Gladys was coming down the street, passing out lost-cat flyers to anyone who would take one. “Have you seen my Blackie? Have you seen my Blackie?”

Kat tried to make a withdrawal from Edith’s bank that afternoon. When the teller asked for picture identification, Kat presented Edith’s driver’s license. She didn’t lie. She just didn’t say she wasn’t Edith.

The teller asked Kat to enter her PIN and then discreetly looked away.

“I’m so embarrassed, but I’ve forgotten it,” Kat said.

The teller’s nails clattered across her keyboard. “Your mother’s maiden name?”

Kat told her.

“Your first pet.”

Edith had had a hamster named Checkers.

The teller stopped typing, squinted at her screen, and then looked querulously at Kat. “It says here that your accounts are frozen in probate. Someone thinks you’re dead.”

The King is coming!

The orchestra’s coronet played a brassy herald.

Vida and her sisters, Regan and Cordelia, marched up the stage ramp in step behind their father, King Lear. The first few seconds onstage, Vida didn’t believe she was a queen any more than the lady in the front row, the one eating M&Ms, believed that
she
was one. A wracking cough in the audience shattered Vida’s concentration, and she had to remind herself that wracking coughs were as common as fleas in pre-Roman Britain.

Some actors prepared for a role by learning everything there was to know about the character, the motivations, and the play’s history, and some actors only wanted to know their own lines. Vida was the latter sort, as was her father the King, imperial despite a stamp of boorishness in his stride, an actor whose subtlety and pride gave Lear divine airs, lest anyone forget how powerful he was. Years ago, when Vida was an understudy for Perdita in
The Winter’s Tale,
her first job in London, that same actor had played Leontes, the irrationally jealous King of Sicilia. Vida had heard that the great British actors, in order to prepare for a performance, went to the zoo to find a primate on which to base their role. Standing in front of the baboon house, she’d found the perfect Perdita, a young female whose haughty airs in no way hinted
at her lowly status. She heard Leontes’s distinct voice behind her. “When I play the King,” he had said, pointing toward a lone male sitting on a rock and cleaning his genitals, “I’m that red-bummed one over there.”

Tonight, he was most certainly King of the Baboons. Shakespeare didn’t create individuals, Samuel Johnson said, he created species. Beneath Lear’s boots, papering the entire outdoor stage, was the map of his kingdom. The designer had intended that the kingdom slowly shred and tear beneath the actors’ feet in rhythm with the King’s undoing, but after last week’s record rainfall, the sodden paper was now as friable as old skin: the King’s world would fall apart far faster than intended. Already pieces of the kingdom were sticking to the actors’ shoes. The only prop onstage was an ornate chair.

As Lear took his throne, all of the members of the royal coterie dropped to their knees in unison, and prostrated, bums to the audience, foreheads to the ground, except Cordelia. The young television actress had no improvisational instincts, and in fear of tearing the map and further changing the course of the play, she remained standing a whole beat longer than her sisters. Vida and Regan exchanged incendiary, almost jubilant smiles. Now, in addition to pride, the King’s favored youngest would be guilty of insolence. Lear spoke:

Tell me, my daughters—

Since now we will divest us both of rule,

Interest of territory, cares of state—

Which of you shall we say doth love us most,

That we our largest bounty may extend

Where nature doth with merit challenge.—Goneril,

Our eldest born, speak first.

Vida spoke:

Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter,

Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty,

Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare,

No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor.

As much as child e’er loved, or father found,

A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable …

Vida entered the all-important pause—the ten heartbeats during which ruthlessness, wile, avarice, and betrayal must flit across her features—but all Vida could think about was that her beautiful old row house was going to be disfigured with acid tomorrow. She barely remembered her line.

Beyond all manner of so much I love you.

Just before coming onstage, she’d unwisely checked her voicemail in the dressing room. Virginia had promised to call if she made any headway with the insurance company, which was still refusing to pay. The only messages were from Edith, six new ones after having not heard from her in more than a week. She knew she should have listened to them and called Edith back, but she was already in character, her voice raspy with queenly arrogance, not a good tone in which to tell someone that her home and everything she owned was about to be burned and there was nothing anyone could do about it. She should have listened to Edith’s fears all along.